About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Friday, May 6, 2016

Syrian refugee camp bombarded, village near Aleppo taken

An air strike on a camp for internally displaced Syrians near the country's border with Turkey has killed at least 30 people, activists said. The attack on the camp in Idlib province on Thursday also left dozens injured. A number of those killed were children, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatoryfor Human Rights.
The Observatory said the dead included women and children and the death toll from the air strikes was likely to rise. Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, said activists were split on whether Russian or Syrian planes were behind the attack.
"Many in the opposition believe that with strikes like this there's proof the government is not serious about the cessation of hostilities,"Khodr said.
In the night of Thursday to Friday rebels meanwhile seized a village from government forces near Aleppo overnight.The rebels won ground in this way, near this Syrian city where the United States and Russia are trying to de-escalate the war.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 73 people had been killed in the battle for Khan Touman, some 15 km (9 miles) southwest of Aleppo in a location near the Damascus-Aleppo highway. Some 30 government forces and 43 rebel forces were killed.
The attack was launched by an alliance of Islamist insurgents known as Jaish al-Fatah, including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, which has rejected diplomatic efforts to halt the war and promote peace talks.
The attack is the latest in Syria, with much of the recent focus on the divided city of Aleppo where nearly 300
people were killed in nearly two weeks of air strikes and shelling. An estimated 400,000 people have so far been killed in the five year old Syrian conflict, according to the UN, with millions more displaced internally and in
neighbouring states.